Jiabao Zhao
赵家宝
Artist, Australia
Jiabao Zhao is a Sydney-based interdisciplinary artist, design computation specialist, and creative technologist working across sculpture, installation, animation, and immersive spatial environments. His practice explores the relationship between cultural memory, symbolic structures, material research, and contemporary urban experience through both digital and physical forms.
Working between computational systems, material research, and tactile fabrication processes, Zhao develops sculptural and spatial works that combine digital fabrication, ceramic processes, emerging bio-based materials, moving image, and spatial design methodologies. Drawing from architectural thinking, procedural generation, and speculative visual language, his practice investigates how abstracted forms can function as imagined artefacts, ceremonial structures, or future relics situated between mythology, civic space, and contemporary culture. Increasingly, his work examines how different materials embody distinct temporalities, lifecycles, and cultural meanings, exploring the relationship between permanence, transformation, and material memory.
Alongside his independent artistic practice, Zhao has over a decade of professional experience in advanced computational design and fabrication workflows across large-scale civic and infrastructure projects throughout Australia and Asia. This intersection between artistic experimentation, fabrication logic, material investigation, and public spatial thinking informs works that balance technical precision with atmospheric and material sensitivity.
His recent practice includes public art commissions, exhibitions, and collaborative installations spanning sculpture, moving image, and spatial environments. Zhao also operates through RandomPlayer Lab, an interdisciplinary platform exploring collaborative approaches to contemporary art, public space, design, and emerging technologies.
Randomplayer Lab is an interdisciplinary creative studio and collaborative platform operating across art, design, material research, and emerging technologies. The lab brings together artists, designers, technologists, and makers from diverse cultural and professional backgrounds to explore new forms of spatial storytelling, material experimentation, and contemporary visual expression.
Working through collaboration and co-creation, RandomPlayer Lab develops projects shaped by dialogue between disciplines, places, materials, and perspectives. The studio embraces cultural plurality, celebrating diverse aesthetic traditions while seeking shared visual languages that can resonate across communities and contexts.
The practice spans installation art, visual art, animation, and both digital and physical sculpture, often combining computational systems with fabrication processes and experimental material approaches. Projects move fluidly between virtual and physical environments, treating artworks as evolving experiences rather than fixed objects while exploring how materials, technologies, and making processes shape cultural narratives and future possibilities.
Community engagement forms an essential part of the studio’s approach. Through participatory processes, workshops, and collaborative development, RandomPlayer Lab positions artistic creation as a space for exchange, learning, and collective imagination, contributing to more inclusive and meaningful public environments.
Guided by experimentation and interdisciplinary dialogue, each project develops its own visual logic shaped by context, collaboration, and material exploration. The studio's work investigates how emerging technologies and evolving material practices can create new relationships between people, objects, and place, while encouraging moments of reflection and connection within the rhythms of contemporary urban life.
Prestige Collection
Immerse yourself in a curated collection where modern technology meets refined aesthetics. Highlighting the artist's finest work, each piece is brought to life through advanced 3D canvas print technology rather than traditional canvas print. Every artwork showcased is available for purchase, inviting you to weave this remarkable visual beauty into your daily surroundings.
.png)
The Six Elements Collection
An evocative six-piece 3D textured canvas collection, uniting the strategic symbolism of the Knight with the primal forces of nature to cultivate abundance and spatial equilibrium.
Masterfully interweaving the tactile finishes of Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, Water, and Marble, the artworks form a continuous loop of elemental harmony.
Conceived as a striking focal point for your interior, this modern surrealist installation infuses any environment with profound architectural balance and dynamic resonance.
.png)
Earth
Knights of Elements – The Animation is a moving image work developed from the ongoing Knights of Elements cross-media series exploring mythology, cultural memory, and symbolic transformation through digital sculpture and speculative world-building. Combining atmospheric environments, animated sculptural forms, and elemental visual systems, the work reinterprets the horse as a contemporary mythological figure situated between Eastern and Western symbolic traditions. Through motion, light, and digitally constructed landscapes, the animation investigates how cultural identities evolve across migration, technology, ritual, and imagined future realities.
Fire
Knights of Elements – The Animation is a moving image work developed from the ongoing Knights of Elements cross-media series exploring mythology, cultural memory, and symbolic transformation through digital sculpture and speculative world-building. Combining atmospheric environments, animated sculptural forms, and elemental visual systems, the work reinterprets the horse as a contemporary mythological figure situated between Eastern and Western symbolic traditions. Through motion, light, and digitally constructed landscapes, the animation investigates how cultural identities evolve across migration, technology, ritual, and imagined future realities.
.png)
Water
Knights of Elements – The Animation is a moving image work developed from the ongoing Knights of Elements cross-media series exploring mythology, cultural memory, and symbolic transformation through digital sculpture and speculative world-building. Combining atmospheric environments, animated sculptural forms, and elemental visual systems, the work reinterprets the horse as a contemporary mythological figure situated between Eastern and Western symbolic traditions. Through motion, light, and digitally constructed landscapes, the animation investigates how cultural identities evolve across migration, technology, ritual, and imagined future realities.
.png)
Wood
Knights of Elements – The Animation is a moving image work developed from the ongoing Knights of Elements cross-media series exploring mythology, cultural memory, and symbolic transformation through digital sculpture and speculative world-building. Combining atmospheric environments, animated sculptural forms, and elemental visual systems, the work reinterprets the horse as a contemporary mythological figure situated between Eastern and Western symbolic traditions. Through motion, light, and digitally constructed landscapes, the animation investigates how cultural identities evolve across migration, technology, ritual, and imagined future realities.
.png)
Metal
Knights of Elements – The Animation is a moving image work developed from the ongoing Knights of Elements cross-media series exploring mythology, cultural memory, and symbolic transformation through digital sculpture and speculative world-building. Combining atmospheric environments, animated sculptural forms, and elemental visual systems, the work reinterprets the horse as a contemporary mythological figure situated between Eastern and Western symbolic traditions. Through motion, light, and digitally constructed landscapes, the animation investigates how cultural identities evolve across migration, technology, ritual, and imagined future realities.
Family
Knights of Elements – The Animation is a moving image work developed from the ongoing Knights of Elements cross-media series exploring mythology, cultural memory, and symbolic transformation through digital sculpture and speculative world-building. Combining atmospheric environments, animated sculptural forms, and elemental visual systems, the work reinterprets the horse as a contemporary mythological figure situated between Eastern and Western symbolic traditions. Through motion, light, and digitally constructed landscapes, the animation investigates how cultural identities evolve across migration, technology, ritual, and imagined future realities.
.png)
Steel
Knights of Elements is the central sculptural manifestation of the ongoing Knights of Elements project, a cross-media body of work exploring mythology, cultural memory, migration, and symbolic transformation through digital and physical forms.
Originally developed for the City of Sydney Lunar Festival, the project reimagines the symbolic relationship between the horse of Chinese chess and the knight of Western chess, transforming them into contemporary mythological figures that exist between cultural systems, historical traditions, and speculative futures. Rather than presenting identity as fixed or singular, Knights of Elements considers culture as something continuously reshaped through movement, exchange, adaptation, and reinvention.
Produced through high-precision 3D ceramic printing and traditional glazing in Jingdezhen, China, Fire Spirit embodies this condition of transition. Suspended between digitally generated form and centuries-old ceramic knowledge, the sculpture exists in a state of intentional ambiguity — simultaneously ancient and futuristic, familiar and unfamiliar, grounded and floating.
The work reflects on the experience of inhabiting multiple cultural realities at once. Like a piece caught between worlds, the figure resists fixed definitions of origin, belonging, or identity. Instead, it occupies a liminal space where memory, tradition, technology, and imagination intersect. Through this suspended condition, Fire Spirit proposes cultural identity not as a destination, but as an ongoing process of transformation.
.png)
Knights of Elements - Fire Spirit
Knights of Elements – Fire Spirit is the central sculptural manifestation of the ongoing Knights of Elements project, a cross-media body of work exploring mythology, cultural memory, migration, and symbolic transformation through digital and physical forms.
Originally developed for the City of Sydney Lunar Festival, the project reimagines the symbolic relationship between the horse of Chinese chess and the knight of Western chess, transforming them into contemporary mythological figures that exist between cultural systems, historical traditions, and speculative futures. Rather than presenting identity as fixed or singular, Knights of Elements considers culture as something continuously reshaped through movement, exchange, adaptation, and reinvention.
Produced through high-precision 3D ceramic printing and traditional glazing in Jingdezhen, China, Fire Spirit embodies this condition of transition. Suspended between digitally generated form and centuries-old ceramic knowledge, the sculpture exists in a state of intentional ambiguity — simultaneously ancient and futuristic, familiar and unfamiliar, grounded and floating.
The work reflects on the experience of inhabiting multiple cultural realities at once. Like a piece caught between worlds, the figure resists fixed definitions of origin, belonging, or identity. Instead, it occupies a liminal space where memory, tradition, technology, and imagination intersect. Through this suspended condition, Fire Spirit proposes cultural identity not as a destination, but as an ongoing process of transformation.
.png)
Knights of Elements - Fire Spirit
Knights of Elements – Fire Spirit is the central sculptural manifestation of the ongoing Knights of Elements project, a cross-media body of work exploring mythology, cultural memory, migration, and symbolic transformation through digital and physical forms.
Originally developed for the City of Sydney Lunar Festival, the project reimagines the symbolic relationship between the horse of Chinese chess and the knight of Western chess, transforming them into contemporary mythological figures that exist between cultural systems, historical traditions, and speculative futures. Rather than presenting identity as fixed or singular, Knights of Elements considers culture as something continuously reshaped through movement, exchange, adaptation, and reinvention.
Produced through high-precision 3D ceramic printing and traditional glazing in Jingdezhen, China, Fire Spirit embodies this condition of transition. Suspended between digitally generated form and centuries-old ceramic knowledge, the sculpture exists in a state of intentional ambiguity — simultaneously ancient and futuristic, familiar and unfamiliar, grounded and floating.
The work reflects on the experience of inhabiting multiple cultural realities at once. Like a piece caught between worlds, the figure resists fixed definitions of origin, belonging, or identity. Instead, it occupies a liminal space where memory, tradition, technology, and imagination intersect. Through this suspended condition, Fire Spirit proposes cultural identity not as a destination, but as an ongoing process of transformation.
.png)
Knights of Elements - Fire Spirit
Knights of Elements – Fire Spirit is the central sculptural manifestation of the ongoing Knights of Elements project, a cross-media body of work exploring mythology, cultural memory, migration, and symbolic transformation through digital and physical forms.
Originally developed for the City of Sydney Lunar Festival, the project reimagines the symbolic relationship between the horse of Chinese chess and the knight of Western chess, transforming them into contemporary mythological figures that exist between cultural systems, historical traditions, and speculative futures. Rather than presenting identity as fixed or singular, Knights of Elements considers culture as something continuously reshaped through movement, exchange, adaptation, and reinvention.
Produced through high-precision 3D ceramic printing and traditional glazing in Jingdezhen, China, Fire Spirit embodies this condition of transition. Suspended between digitally generated form and centuries-old ceramic knowledge, the sculpture exists in a state of intentional ambiguity — simultaneously ancient and futuristic, familiar and unfamiliar, grounded and floating.
The work reflects on the experience of inhabiting multiple cultural realities at once. Like a piece caught between worlds, the figure resists fixed definitions of origin, belonging, or identity. Instead, it occupies a liminal space where memory, tradition, technology, and imagination intersect. Through this suspended condition, Fire Spirit proposes cultural identity not as a destination, but as an ongoing process of transformation.
Collaboration of 3D Canvas Print with Artists
We create a stage for artists worldwide to share their creativity and passion. Each work becomes a voice, a story, a spark of imagination crossing borders.
Art is a universal language. By joining hands with creators everywhere, we invite communities to be immersed in its richness, brilliance, and the infinite spirit of art.